The suggestion of constructing a Forth-Clyde canal as a means of providing ex-service men with employment and of adding to the strength of the Navy was put forward by General Sir Ian Hamilton in declaring open the British Legion Club at Nelson, Lancashire.
Sir Ian said that the proposal for joining the two great Firths was put forward by Charles LI., but nothing had ever been done. "At last ai day has come," Sir Ian declared, "when T venture to ask a great city which has seen for itself the advantages of Manchester-Liverpool Ship Canal, to consider whether, having just opened a Legion Club for ex-service men who have most of them found employment, they might not go a step further and bring: pressure to bear on the new Government to find something for the great number of unemployed ex-service men to do. @he project is national, I might almost say Imperial. Mr. Bonar Law is a Glasgow man, and he should be very much flattered if you took. it up."
Sir Ian said that there was a very strong military aspect to the case. The only way to add to the strength of the Grand Fleet, owing to the limitation of the Washington Treaty, was by seeing that everything was quite perfect, and that could be done by enabling it to pass securely from the North Sea into the Atlantic, and vice versa. America had set the example with the Panama Canal. Submarines and aircraft had made the powers of safely shifting.its strategical base nothing less than vital to any Navy—it-was the Kiel Canal which denied the Baltic to our Grand Fleet during the war.
As to the work which would be provided for ex-service men. Sir lan said that according to figures he had been given, the cost of the canal would be £24,000,000, and it would take five years to complete. Fifty thousand ex-service men would immediately find employment upon it, men who had had years of training in digging trenches which was exactly what was wanted. Eighty thousand more would be indirectly employed.
Referring to the present condition of ex-service men, Sir lan said that although the kingdom had hardly ever been in a worse state than at present, the demobbed men kad often, he would say always, been worse treated than they were to-day, and he instanced the times of Marlborough, Wellington, and the old Duke of Cambridge. On the other hand, the general position of the country, its ability to absorb and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.